Don’t Tell, Ask

Don’t Tell, Ask

I recently read an article about communications between generations.  The upshot being that each succeeding generation is raised in a manner that reflects their parent generation’s beliefs in child rearing, not the manner in which they, the parent generation, was raised.  Or, people raise their own children how they believe children should be raised, not how they were raised.

Myself, I was raised in a time when spanking your children was not only acceptable, it was damn near required, or expected.  If your kids misbehaved, you spanked them.  If you were a kid and you acted really badly, first you were warned, “I’m gonna clobber you!”  And, you continued to act out, you got clobbered. 

Today, if you hit your kid, you can get arrested – or worse, Child Protection Services will come and take your kid away from you.

Now during the time period when my wife and I raised our children, we are now grandparents, you could smack your kids, but it was frowned on.  We were actually advised by the Child Rearing books of the time, to smack them on their bottoms.  Never hit them on the head or anything, but a bottom slap was good for them.  My wife and I never did that, we just yelled – which we are now told was wrong, or worse than hitting them.

Sigh …

It seems whatever parents do, once their children are grown, that was wrong.  Young parents always seem to know more than their parents about raising kids.  Is this true? 

Horseshit.

The article I mentioned at the start of this blog, says we now need to ask the younger generation to do things, we aren’t supposed to tell them to do things anymore.  We have to ask them … ?  What are the current parents teaching their children with this asking thing?  Don’t spank, don’t swat, don’t yell, don’t tell – ask???   Who’re the parents in this scenario?  Why not just give the kids some big knives?  Don’t want to do something?  Stab the person telling you to do it, or worse.  I mean, after all, whose place is it to tell you to do anything?

You’re a young person with no fucking concept of how the world actually works, but you got rights!  Right!  Somehow, somewhere there has to be some kind of logic, some kind of middle ground.  I can’t be certain, but right now, right here in this country, you could spank your kids and claim it was on religious grounds and that’d be totally fine.  Well, as long it was Christian religious grounds.  Maybe that’s a stretch, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

To me a big part of it is we now have too many people running around on the government’s dime who seem to be calling the shots.  I admit to be a left-leaning voter, but sometimes I do believe these Protection Agencies get a bit out of line.  Mostly we have too many people whose sole purpose for being employed is to remain employed and if they have to spend their days jumping in puddles to splash on other people, well … that bothers me.

How does a parent discipline a child when all they are permitted to do anymore is talk to the kid?  A kid of an age where they simply have no context by which to understand many concepts of right or wrong behavior?  How do you do that?  How do you make it stick – get it into their heads and long-term memory that whacking the family dog with a stick is wrong – or similar actions.  Or throwing their bowl of oatmeal on the floor because they want fruity-dooty-marshmellow-crisp-crunch. Stuff like that.

“Okay, you’re gonna get a time-out.”  Give me a fucking break.  After raising six children, I can say without a tiny doubt that does not work.  It doesn’t work with adults, where do we get the idea it’s going to work with kids.  A guy gets caught drunk and speeding through town.  The law doesn’t say, “Okay, now you’re gonna get a time-out.”  We have all seen it on TV – half the time the guy gets pulled out of the car and beat with a baton and then he gets hauled off to jail.

So the guy goes to jail, serves his time, goes to AA and stops drinking and joins a church choir and then his little kids throws a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal in his face.  He’s supposed to say, “Oh oh oh!  It’s a time-out for you young man.”  Hmmm … Does that seem real to you?

So I am not justifying hitting the kid.  But taking down the box of fruity-dooty-marshmellow-crisp-crunch and pouring it down the garbage disposal right in front of the kid, that might work.  Then making sure that all the kid gets for breakfast for a week is oatmeal.  Maybe lunch and dinner too.  Or he goes hungry – but Child Protection would bust you for that too.

To wrap up this blog, the only thing I can come up with is to just not have children.  I mean what else is there?  Anything you do is gonna be wrong, even illegal, in the eyes of somebody and some of those people are gonna wreck your life if you do the wrong thing.  Yup.  Best to avoid the whole issue.

Thanks for reading.
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Liver! … And Why I became a Vegetarian

Liver! … And Why I became a Vegetarian

The most horrible food I have ever tasted, truly the most foul, including the time I tried Scottish Haggis, is my own mother’s home cooked liver.  Actually, at the time I kind of liked the haggis.  But I was like maybe nine years old and when hungry I was known to eat cold burnt toast.  I once ate an entire package of saltine crackers with nothing but butter spread thickly on each cracker.

But my mother’s fried liver and onions?  Kill me first.  My brother and sister and I held a meal less vigil every night we even smelled her liver and onions.  In fact many of those nights I had to leave the house.  It tasted like a slab of burnt blood.  Which is to say I have never actually tasted a slab of burnt blood, but that is what my imagination conjures up.  Burnt blood.  Dry, ugly brown, chalk-like burnt blood.

I did like fried onions, but if they had shared the pan with her liver, well, forget it.

My father, who grew up on a farm just like my mother, loved her liver and onions.  He was a big man though and had a big man appetite and wasn’t much of an epicure.  Meat and potatoes.  Steak, nearly raw.  Lots of bacon.  He would eat a brick if it had bacon on it.  And he did not have any aspirations to become an epicure.  Down home on the farm and he liked his food that way.

Now my father did become an important man in the U.S. military, but his food preferences remained plain.  My mother became more ambitious in her desire to experience a wider range of delicacies and epicurean delights as my father’s position rose.  And as her children we were treated to, or experimented upon – depending on your view point – lots of different world cultural food like adventures.

I did try fried grasshoppers – not bad.  Garden snails – quite good.  English eel – never again.  Actually we lived in England for three years, so I tried a lot of English treats.  Most of it was pretty bland or simply, “Why would you cook anything like this?”  The only vegetables the English ate (at that time) were boiled into a sludge.  Generally a kind of puke beige sludge.  With globs of some kind of meat lard blobbishness floating in it.

English cabbage – what is this?  Bread pudding – loved that with their rum sauce and raisins.  Meat pies – okay, but what are those green pills in it?  Oh, those are peas.  Why are those peas so damned hard?  Bangers ‘n mash – salty and stay close to a restroom.  Fish ‘n chips (wrapped in a newspaper) with salt ‘n vinegar – delicious.  Fish ‘n chips – best thing about England. 

Now Scottish food is quite different, starting with the haggis.  The best thing about Scotland, other than being quite beautiful when it ain’t raining – and it’s raining most of the time – is the scones.  Scottish scones are almost worth the trip alone.

But this blog is about how and why I became a vegetarian, almost forty years ago. 

Pretty simple really.  I married a vegetarian and she didn’t cook meat.  Wouldn’t even cook in a pan that had had meat cooked in it.  So all of the cookware I owned at the time went into the garbage.  Had to buy all new stuff.  But she was a really, still is, good cook and after a few years I stopped thinking about meat.  So much so that now when I even smell meat, my mind says, “What the hell is that?”  My mouth does not water.  Just conditioning, really.  If you’ve never smelled coconut milk, you wouldn’t think of it as a food.

My wife doesn't, nor has ever indicated, that she cared one way or another if I did chose to eat meat.  Just not at home and she won't cook it.

I have experienced very good health all these years without meat.  I’ve done a lot of stuff that requires pretty demanding stamina and never had a problem keeping up with or even staying ahead of nearly everyone else.  So the argument that, as humans, we need to eat meat, I have found is mostly bogus – at least in my life it has proven to be bogus.  You do what you want, I don’t care.

It was mostly that liver though.  After nearly forty years, just the smell of cooking meat makes me think of my mother’s fried liver ‘n onions and I get queasy.  Life is kind of funny that way.  Sometimes, one very seemingly insignicant experience can stick with us like forever and we can’t seem to overcome it. 

I uncovered, by mistake, a ground wasp hive and got stung six times in a nano-second.  Hurt like bullets – not afraid of wasps.  Still hate liver.  Can’t stand burnt oatmeal cookies.  Still love oatmeal cookies that aren’t burnt.  Still hate liver.  Motorcycle fell over once and the muffler burnt my leg right down to the muscle layer – still ride my bike.  Still hate liver.  Don’t eat meat, ‘cause it reminds me of liver.

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Back to Television – Drinking Again?

Back to Television – Drinking Again?

It would seem there is union requirement for television actors to be doing something, apparently anything, with their hands during every scene.  This is especially true when they are having a one on one, two person, type of meeting; read dialogue.  They can’t just sit down and talk.  Or stand there and talk, hands in their pockets, picking their noses, or some real life natural kind of thing.  (Adjusting their underwear?)

A drink of some kind must be present.  At least offered and almost always accepted – a couple fingers of scotch or whiskey of some sort is most common.  Gotta have that drink in their hand or they can’t seem to remember their lines.  Always every freakin’ scene in every freakin’ show where two people are talking.

There is one show I particularly like where the overall theme is a couple of police type brothers live with their wise and always calm father.  These guys will never be seen in their little home without having a beer in their hands and several empties on the table.  If anyone of them enters a room where the others are, the first thing out of his mouth is, “Anybody want a beer?”  In any other situation we might calls these guys “bums” (?), or maybe lushes, beer heads(?).  Slobs(?)

Since nobody can smoke anymore, like nobody ever smokes anymore?  Right … Smoking, according to American television is right down there somewhere below pedophilia or snorting crack or maybe both at the same time.  I remember when everybody on television smoked.  Everybody!  All the time – like factory chimneys.  Even the television Doctors in television hospitals smoked when they were talking to television patients … who were also smoking.  Game shows where all the panelists were smoking and the MC was smoking through the entire program, only to take commercial break to talk about the wonders of a particular brand of cigarette.

Now everybody has to have a drink in their hand or they can’t seem to function.  During office hours  at the Police Headquarters, they’re slammin’ back cup after cup of coffee.  Or meeting up in the coffee room where they are making coffee and dumping about fifteen sugars into a ratty paper cup and a pint of some (one assumes) non-dairy coffee creamer.  The fiddling with the sugar and non-dairy creamer is, of course, just to occupy their hands, once again.  I mean nobody could actually drink a cup of coffee with that much sugar and cream in it, without gagging.  Wait a minute I think I just described a Starbucks cappacino…  Okay forget that part.

Once the end of the day work bell has sounded, it’s drinky-poo time.  You can always tell the good cops from the corrupt bad cops by the drinks they drink in the local hangout, as explained in a previous blog about meeting up for a beer after every 47 minute adventure.  Good cops drink beer and bad cops drink hard liquor.  Because good cops are plain speakin’ good ole American boys who love their mothers and a beer after work is just straight (why aren’t there any good gay cops) and … well, good and what ya ought do if you’re good cop.  Bad cops, in their other holster are … well, alcoholics.

Bad politicians always have a strong hard drink the minute they are behind a closed door.  These guys always seem to have a fully stocked wet bar in their offices, with, I might add, where the hooch is always in decanters.  (Who does this for them?  Never the store shelf bottle, always in a decanter.  Crystal with a knobby stopper.  Somebody’s pouring that stuff in there for them.  God knows they would never do such a menial task themselves.)

You can tell immediately if the next actor in on the scene is a good guy or a bad guy.  The baddy always offers the entering actor a drink.  If the new guy on the scene takes the drink – woah! He is also a bad guy.  If he says “No”, then he’s a good guy.  It’s a little Hollywood secret (yeah, like none of the 100 million viewers haven’t figured it out – ever.)  When a good cop drinks hard liquor, he’s always at home alone.  Why are these guys always so dedicated they never seem to have significant others – anyway.  There he/she is knockin’ back at least two or three doubles, alone, in a dark room (sepia toned room … always sepia toned).  As I remember, drinking alone is one of the warning signs of something … what was that?  Oh yeah!  Drinking alone is one strong indication that yer a drunk!

Okay, not to complain and not offer a solution.  Why not try this:  the good cop is always seen knockin’ back a bottle of a health drink?  Say carrot juice.  Or a protein drink.  Too much?  Too far out there?  Maybe he/she simply stands there with his/her hands in his/her pockets.  There was one famous TV detective who was always sucking on lollypops because he was trying to quite smoking.  And as I understand it that was just something the actor himself came up with.  An ad lib.  The hack writers never would have thought of it.  That was at least twenty years ago and no-ho-body has come up with anything approaching that originality since.

Maybe the TV writers should shadow actual characters they are writing about.  Like follow one after work.  Hey, he/she went home.  Ate dinner with the family, sat in the TV room with wife/husband, watched some show, went to bed.  Got up and went to work again.  Didn’t get drunk, didn’t slap husband/wife around, didn’t traumatize the kids or kick the dog.  Didn’t sneak in a call and accept a bribe or plan a hit on some rival. 

Sigh … well, at least one of them is always building a boat in his basement.  A boat you can just tell he is never going to get out of that basement.  But he’s got a hobby.  Of course, he is divorced – ‘cause he’s so consumed with work.  So he’s alone.  Of course.  And, of course, while he’s working on that boat what is he also doing?  Knockin’ back some kind of whisky!  Even working on a boat he’s gotta be tanked.

I’ve lived for thirty years without drinking alcohol and these guys can’t make it for 47 minutes.  I’m no saint, just sayin’ …

http://youtu.be/G6pWiHUIzVs

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